The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) has held the ISCB Latin America Conference on Bioinformatics in Santiago, Chile, in March 17-21, 2012. This meeting constituted the second regional ISCB Latin America meeting, with the first held in Montevideo, Uruguay, in March 2010.

Conferences are key to the development and exchange of new ideas in science. Over the years many thousands of participants have attended ISCB’s annual ISMB conferences. As the majority of those attendees do their research in North America and Europe, the ISCB Regional Conferences aim to break the barrier imposed by high cost travel. How? By bringing a high quality conference, including lectures delivered by world-renowned scientists, to the regions of Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Toward this aim, in 2009 ISCB began organizing a newer series of smaller, regionally-based meetings as part of its mission to advance the science through world-wide education and training activities. These regional meetings have included ISCB-Africa (Mali 2009, South Africa 2011), ISCB-Latin America (Uruguay 2010) and ISCB-Asia (Malaysia 2011).

ISCB also aims to provide more students the opportunity to discuss and participate in the latest developments in bioinformatics and computational biology by bringing these meetings closer to home. We hope the ISCB-Latin America 2012 has been the second of many conferences that will contribute to the growth of the field within this region and support scientific innovation across Latin America.

More than 250 people attended, primarily from countries in Latin America.

The first two days of the meeting (March 17-18) were dedicated to hands-on practical tutorials and workshops covering different topics of interest.

The main conference took place March 19th-21st and featured the following six topic sessions (Each session had two keynote speakers and six oral presentations. There were also two poster sessions):